The Program Quality Criteria include ten components designed to help validate a comprehensive career and technical education (CTE) program. Upon a self review or third party review, any program may use this instrument to determine how the program has made progress in its development. The review instrument is not designed as an evaluation tool,…

During the last decade, policy and public attention have focused increasingly on the out-of-school hours, and programs to fill this time have proliferated for children and youth. These programs serve varying purposes, including providing child care and a safe haven, improving academic performance, enhancing general youth development, allowing…

Assessments of studies meant to evaluate the effectiveness of interventions, programs, and policies can serve an important role in the interpretation of research results. However, evidence suggests that available quality assessment tools have poor measurement characteristics and can lead to opposing conclusions when applied to the same body of…

In the modern world, higher education is transitioning from enrollment mode to recruitment mode. This shift paved the way for institutional research and policy making from historical data perspective. More and more universities in the U.S. are implementing and using enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, which collect vast amounts of data.…

Information systems benefits for individuals (ISBI) has been a key construct for the IS success model, which has evolved over the years to strengthen the theoretical foundation for the IS field. However, relatively little research has been done to explore, develop and validate the underlying theoretical dimensions for this crucial construct.…

The Ohio Department of Education created Early Learning Content Standards in 2004 for children aged three to five grounded in research in the content areas of math, science, social studies and English/Language Arts. This mixed method study was designed to examine the perceptions of preschool teachers as they aligned the early learning content…

The purpose of this study was to develop a tool to evaluate the quality of a clinical information system (CIS) conceived by nurses and conduct a pilot test with the developed tool as an initial assessment. CIS quality is required for successful implementation in information technology (IT) environments. The study started with the realization that…

Social work practice requires that graduates be prepared to deal with complex, multifaceted problems which cannot be defined completely, do not have absolute, correct answers and can be approached from multiple perspectives. This study evaluated the influence of case-based instruction on MSW students' reflective judgment, an aspect of critical…

As one set of responses to the increasing demands of adequate yearly progress exerted by the No Child Left Behind Act, schools have been using professional learning communities as a tool to improve academic performance. The researcher conducted this descriptive quantitative study to query principals from 40 high- and 40 low-performing elementary…

In response to test-based accountability (No Child Left Behind, 2001), schools and districts across the country are adopting a variety of supplemental assessments aimed at improving student performance. These interim assessments are administered more than once during the school year for the following purposes: (1) predicting student performance on…

When attempting to determine if an intervention has a causal impact, the "gold standard" of program evaluation is the randomized controlled trial (RCT). In education studies random assignment is rarely feasible at the student level, making RCTs harder to conduct. School-level assignment is more common but this often requires considerable resources…

Purpose/Objectives: The purpose of this study was to determine the best practices (quality indicators) related to recess placement before lunch in elementary schools; compile a best practices checklist that can be used as an assessment tool for school nutrition programs; and validate and evaluate the usefulness of the best practices checklist.…

This article summarizes the use of SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis and subsequent action planning as a tool of self-assessment to meet CAS (Council for the Advancement of Standards in Higher Education) requirements for systematic assessment. The use of the evaluation results to devise improvements to increase the…

This article discusses large-scale assessment of change in student achievement and takes the study by Hickendorff, Heiser, Van Putten, and Verhelst (2009) as an example. This study compared the achievement of students in the Netherlands in 1997 and 2004 on written division problems. Based on this comparison, they claim that there is a performance…

The Academy for Educational Development (AED) sent a research team to Western Kentucky University (WKU) on June 19-20, 2008 to conduct interviews with individuals who play important roles in the university's teacher preparation program (see Appendix A). These interviews, along with additional documentation provided by WKU and identified by the AED…